Last week, a story caught my eye and the attention of some of my colleagues. As reported first by Bloomberg BNA, IBM has stopped providing the comparison information that is typically required in separation agreements for older workers under the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act.
You may be wondering how that is possible. Robin
My colleague, Gabe Jiran predicted the future!
Well, not exactly. But in a post earlier this month, he outlined some of the issues relating to whether telecommuting is a reasonable accommodation under the ADA.
And now we have some court guidance on the subject. The road to understanding an aspect of the “reasonable accommodation”
My colleague, Gabe Jiran, (go read his impressive background here, I’ll wait) recently gave a presentation on telecommuting and I asked Gabe to share his thoughts on a notable topic that came up for discussion there. Thus, in this post, Gabe discusses whether telecommuting could be a “reasonable accommodation.”
With today’s technology, employees seem
Last year, the General Assembly considered changes to the Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. That bill did not receive a final vote. This year, it’s back but recently died in the Judiciary Committee, according to the CBIA. Will it get attached to another bill? Will it be tweaked further this fall in preparation for next year’s term? My colleague, Christopher Parkin, chimes in with the details and why employers need to keep an eye on any proposed changes.
The ink is still drying on the most recent round of changes at the CHRO, the massive amendments known as PA 11-237 (in fact, the CHRO website still points to old versions of the General Statutes), but the legislature has been grappling with proposed changes to the statutes that govern the CHRO in the last few months.
These amendments, Senate Bill 385, represent a considerable effort to clean up antiquated language and recodify the statutes to make them more accessible to the public.
Among the hundreds of technical amendments built into the bill are plenty of new substantive changes that employers and their counsel will need to become familiar with. Recently the CBIA has noted that this particular effort has seemed to die in committee; however, the bill is likely to reappear at one point or another. Here are the details and the impact on employers when this is considered again.
Investigator and mediator will no longer be the same person
The CHRO has long been criticized for its practice of combining the mediation and investigation process by assigning a single investigator to handle both duties, a process the Commission has insisted is a function of insufficient funding. Until recently, mediations and fact findings were very frequently held consecutively in one marathon day.
Nobody is best served when these processes are combined. Neither employers nor employees can fully trust the confidentiality of the mediation process when the mediator will be tasked with soliciting testimony a few hours later if the case doesn’t settle.
It’s also not fair to the investigators to expect that they can fully partition their brain between mediation and investigation to conduct both appropriately.
Continue Reading A New “CAR” And Other Proposed Changes to CHRO – Can They Get It Right?
You have a disabled employee out of leave for 180 days. Your policy says that employees may be terminated after the end of 180 days. So, on day 181, can you fire the employee?
Today, my colleague Christopher Parkin tackles that difficult question in a recent ADA case brought by the EEOC against a very
If you’re like most employers that do background checks, you probably haven’t thought twice about the documentation you use for it.
Perhaps you’ve copied some standard language you’ve found off the Internet (not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that), or maybe you’ve just used a form that has been handed down from one
My good friend, Jon Hyman of the Ohio Employer’s Law Blog, probably said it best this morning:
I try to shy away from hyperbole, but OH MY GOD, THIS CASE COULD BE RUINOUS!!!
Yeah, pretty much.
So, if you — like me — have been
The short session of the Connecticut General Assembly is set to begin on February 5, 2014.
But the jockeying for items to get on the agenda is well under way. The Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities is circulating a proposed bill that would followup on a failed bill from last year’s term.
I previously discussed this proposal in a post last May.
At the time, the proposed bill was thought to be close to passage, but time ran out in the session before it could be picked up. Earlier versions the bill proved quite troublesome; this latest version still has issues that haven’t been addressed and it’s important for employers to speak up now before the changes are put into place.
So what are some of the changes this bill would bring?
Changes to “Mental Disability”
The bill expands the definition of a “mental disability” to not only “mental disorders, as defined in the most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’”, but also to including having “a record of or regarding a person as having one or more such disorders”.
Put aside, for the moment whether including everything in the new DSM5 is worthwhile. The more troubling issue is that the proposed law would continue to cover “regarded as” claims for mental disabilities. The references to a “past history” of mental disability in existing law being removed by this bill are less significant because a “record” of disability would now be covered.
Why is that problematic? Becaues that the definition is inconsistent with how a “physical” disability is treated; where is the reference to being “regarded” as having a physical disability?
Rather than continue to treat mental and physical disabilities as distinct from each other, the legislature should take its cues from the ADA and match its definitions accordingly. Otherwise, we’ll continue to have three different standards to analyze disability claims — one for ADA claims, and two for state disability-related claims.Continue Reading Legislative Preview: Will the CHRO Bill Get Passed This Year?
Suppose you have to terminate an employee who is over the age of 40 and you decide to offer that employee a separation agreement.
(I’ve previously covered the “standard” provisions in an agreement here and discussed a 2009 EEOC Guidance on the subject here.)
You already know (right?) that releases for employees over
My colleague, Peter Murphy, was invited to speak at a recent Connecticut Bar Association panel about the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. Peter is well-versed in the intracacies of the agency and I asked Peter to share his insights from the panel discussion below.
As Dan noted in a recent blog post